Classroom
I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.—Neil Gaiman, The Sandman
Tarnmoor 
Does Gaiman really believe this blather or is he just putting words in a character’s mouth to show how stupid this character really is? We learn these sorts of things through experience, not by having it poured into one’s empty skull. School teaches one to read and write and some basic facts about the world about us; sometimes good teachers actually encourage students to think.
I don’t know, Fred. I rather like this quote, even though I am not familiar with Gaiman’s novels. My feeling is that too many people — perhaps because they are not interested in bringing up their children themselves — push too many things onto the schools. Experience is, of course, the great teacher of these things — that and good friends upon whom you can rely.
That’s my point. Gaiman is blaming schools for not doing something they aren’t equipped to do. Moreover he says that schools “don’t teach you anything worth knowing.” I wonder where he learned to read and write.
“They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer.” I can’t imagine a class on this or the other things he’s listed.
I have read several of his novels, by the way. He’s not on my “must read” list, but I have no strong objections to reading his works.
As far as I’m concerned, if this really represents Gaiman’s thinking, then he’s part of the anti-intellectual climate that’s pervasive throughout this country.
Bringing up children to some is a nice hobby . They only pay attention to it when the rest of the important stuff is done. like impressing your neighbors or church , playing with your friends making lot of money .
Well, we encounter some of those things in school, as in any other environment. And it’s even part of the curriculum, in great literature classes, in sports, at the school dances. I speak as a teacher who has disarmed two boys who brought guns to school, taught high school classes on 9/11, and talked to girls after school about birth control, and why they should tell their mothers that they were “proving their love” to their boyfriends, etc. And then there were the children who had nothing to eat for days and fainted at school, and couldn’t afford the school lunch, or weren’t able to go in the cafeteria because of a lice infestation, and so we had to wash their hair for them. No water in the labor camps, or power. Possibly Mr. Gaiman never taught in poorer school systems, or at all.